10 Cracking Ideas

It’s amazing what you can build from little plastic bricks; and in the case of LEGO^®, it’s a worldwide empire worth billions.

In 1947, a Danish carpenter called Ole Kirk Christiansen saw samples of a product called ‘Self-Locking Building Bricks’… and started to experiment. A couple of years later, Ole and his son Godtfred produced their own ‘Automatic Binding Bricks’ which snapped together using raised ‘studs’.

This eventually became LEGO^® – rejected at first, because no-one thought that plastic toys could ever take the place of wooden ones. But son Godtfred saw LEGO^®’s immense potential for creative play and kept going. The market grew and grew. Today, the LEGO^® Group makes around 600 pieces every second just to keep up with demand.

Robots, pirates, fairy castles, dinosaurs and superheroes have all been created in LEGO^®; there are LEGO^®land amusement parks; even smart bricks called LEGO^® Mindstorms^® that can be PC-programmed to perform complicated tasks. So, if anyone ever tells you that your great idea will ‘never catch on’, remember this humble plastic brick – and keep trying.

The iMac^® From little grey boxes to ‘Bondi blue’When Apple^®’s iMac^® burst onto the scene in 1998, it changed the face of desktop computers forever. In a world of grey boxes, the original G3 iMac^® broke all the rules. For a start it wasn’t square but egg-shaped and enclosed by ‘Bondi blue’ translucent plastic. On release, it became the best-selling computer in both the US and Japan.

According to Apple^®, the ‘i’ stood for ‘Internet’; with the promise that new users could get online in two simple steps. In one advert, seven-year-old Johann Thomas showed how – in 8 minutes and 15 seconds, beating a Stanford University MBA student with a Hewlett-Packard computer hands down.

Since the early days, the iMac^® has evolved – through 13 colours or ‘flavours’ of the original G3 to today’s more streamlined designs. The man who led this journey is Jonathan Ive CBE, currently Senior Vice President of Industrial Design at Apple^®. Ive studied industrial design in Newcastle before moving to America to work with Apple^®. Despite winning many awards, he remains modest and unselfish, emphasizing the teamwork behind the products that have made him famous.

The World Wide Web is a fantastic computer network made up of a vast number of Internet sites all offering their resources (text, sound, graphics and so on) via a computer language called ‘hypertext’. In short, it places the world at your fingertips.

Hypertext documents are inter-connected in such a complex way that a human being would never be able to navigate through them (a bit like your sock drawer!). Instead, the web browser in your computer does this for you using ‘hyperlinks’. So, when you’re ‘browsing’ or ‘surfing’ the Internet, you’re simply following hyperlinks from one website to another.

Englishman Sir Tim Berners-Lee is most often named as the inventor of the World Wide Web. He first suggested a project for researchers to share and update information in 1980, but it wasn’t until 1989 that he saw the opportunity to join hypertext with the Internet and (as he says); “Ta-da! – the World Wide Web”.

Crucially, Berners-Lee made his idea freely available, with no patent and no royalties due. As a result, we can all follow the example set by scientists of sharing information to further our collective knowledge.

Plasticine^® is a putty-like modelling material first formulated by art teacher William Harbutt.

Harbutt’s secret composition, patented in 1899, is non-toxic, sterile, soft and doesn’t dry out. Unlike clay, it cannot be hardened by firing. In fact, it is flammable – and the original Plasticine^® factory was destroyed by fire in 1963.

At first Plasticine^® came in one colour only; grey (great for elephants and mice, but not much else…). But it was soon made available in the wide variety of colours we know and love. Plasticine^® proved immediately popular with children and art teachers and today, this iconic material is also used in Oscar-winning animation – enter Wallace and Gromit, stage left.

These popular characters spring from the imagination of Nick Park who uses a technique known as ‘claymation’ to bring them to life. Wallace is himself an inventor, creating elaborate contraptions that often don’t work as planned. Some of them are based on real-life inventions. For example, Wallace’s tip-up bed is similar to one shown by Theophilus Carter at the Great Exhibition of 1851 (although that didn’t feature extra ‘assistance’ in the form of a large mallet!).

From the minute we wake up and turn on the light, we are using electricity. We simply press a switch and on come our computers, our TVs, our hair straighteners... you name it. But how did we learn how to generate and harness this power and use it for our own (frizzy) ends?

One person who played a key role in this was Michael Faraday, one of the most influential experimenters of all time.

It was Faraday who discovered the means for generating electricity by something called ‘electromagnetic induction’. He went on to build a basic dynamo; a machine that converts mechanical energy into electrical energy. This was the ancestor of modern power generators – and something which changed society forever.

Faraday had little in the way of schooling, but he developed a love of science books when working for a bookbinder and bookseller. By the time he died he had been offered both a knighthood (which he refused) and the role of President of the Royal Society (which he turned down twice); quite a journey for this poor boy from Newington Butts, in London.

In Central and South America, rubber has been harvested from trees since ancient times. Early civilizations played a game using rubber balls, and the Maya made a type of temporary rubber footwear by dipping their feet into a latex mixture. After a series of dippings and dryings, a strong ‘shoe’ could be peeled from the foot and used as needed for protection against rough ground or insect bites.

The need to make rubber commercially is largely down to the motor car.

From the 1890s, there was a growing demand for rubber car tyres and the cost of natural rubber rose steeply. As a result, companies started exploring ways of producing synthetic rubber and this led to DuPont^® discovering ‘Neoprene’.

Neoprene proved far too expensive for use in car tyres – but excellent for wetsuits, car fan belts, laptop covers and many other weird and wonderful uses. It shows how inventing is a funny business; you might not end up with the result you were hoping for, but you could still find yourself with a great (and profitable) innovation.

20 million bikes are owned in the UK, which means that around 1 in 3 of us has one. And whilst we’re used to seeing them everywhere, bicycles look a good deal different today to how they did in the early years.

The first documented ancestor to the modern bicycle was introduced by the Baron Karl von Drais in 1818. It had two in-line wheels connected by a wooden frame. The rider sat astride and pushed it along with his feet, whilst steering a front wheel.

The next major breakthrough came in 1870, when James Starley developed the famous and far more successful Penny-Farthing; the name referring to coins which, when placed next to each other, resembled the side view of the bicycle.

Today, mountain bikes are one of the most popular types of bike. They have up to 21 gears, wide heavy-treaded tyres and can cost thousands of pounds. Inventor Michael Killian has his money on something quite different; his new Sideways Bike, which has a set of handlebars at either end. Plain daft or plain genius? Time will tell.

Television is part of modern life. We depend in it for entertainment, news, education, weather, sports, music.. and more. Many UK homes have more than one set; you can even get special waterproof TVs for the bathroom. So who made all this ‘essential viewing’ possible?

The person most often credited with inventing television is John Logie Baird, whose mechanical ‘Televisor’ was patented in 1923. The prototype used (amongst other things) an old tea chest, a cardboard circle cut from a hat box, a darning needle, a discarded biscuit box and a few bull's-eye lenses glued together with sealing wax and string. It was a precarious contraption, but it worked.

Baird gave the first public demonstration at Selfridges^® department store in 1925, and unveiled the Televisor in his London laboratory the following year to much fanfare.

From 1929 until 1935, the BBC broadcast television programmes using the Baird system but electronic broadcasting soon took over. Baird continued to make a contribution however, even suggesting a colour system that would have been comparable to today’s HDTV had it gone ahead, proving he was a real visionary.

You might not imagine your great, great grandparents in denim, but jeans were invented as far back as 1873. The men behind this new form of ‘waist overalls’ were tailor Jacob Davis and retailer Levi Strauss; together, they turned denim, thread and little metal rivets into the most popular clothing product in the world.

The idea started with a problem. Davis had a customer who kept ripping the pockets of his trousers. One day, he hit upon the idea of putting metal rivets on the corners for added strength. These riveted trousers were an instant hit. The trouble was, Davis didn't have the $68 needed to file a patent – so he thought of Strauss...

In 1873, the two men received their patent and before long, all types of working men were buying the innovative new trousers.

When the patent expired, dozens of manufacturers began to imitate the original riveted clothing made popular by Levi Strauss & Co^®. Since then, denim jeans have been constantly reinvented – from baggy to skinny, dark rinse to snow wash, high waist to low rise. Where next?

Who invented the aeroplane? The most popular answer to this question is ‘the Wright Brothers’, but that’s not the whole story...

Back in 1853, a full half-a-century before the Wright Brothers’ ‘first’ flight, Sir George Cayley built a successful passenger-carrying glider. Then in 1856, Frenchman Jean-Marie Le Bris made the first powered flight (with a little help from a horse...). And in 1883, the American John J. Montgomery made a controlled flight in a glider. Other aviators also made similar flights but their efforts were less well-documented than those of the famous Wright Brothers who successfully patented their ‘flying machine’.

Orville and Wilbur Wright made their first successful test flights in December 1903. The first flight, of 39 metres (120 feet) in 12 seconds, was recorded in a famous photograph. Orville (who had won the toss of a coin to pilot the plane) reached speeds of 6.8 mph. Today, the Boeing^® X-43, an experimental scramjet with the world speed record for a jet-powered aircraft, can reach nearly 7,000 mph (or Mach 7) – which shows how far the technology has accelerated since take off.